Elizabeth Cherchia

Elizabeth is a civil engineering student from New York with a minor in Social Entrepreneurship. Most of her time is spent working with Engineers Without Borders; a nonprofit group that partners with communities to address their most pressing infrastructure problems. She leads a project assisting a community in rural Uganda with the design and implementation of a village-wide, financially-sustainable drinking water system. Her studies have taken her to South Africa to study social entrepreneurship and work with micro-entrepreneurs, and to Nicaragua to study the role of cooperatives in poverty alleviation for coffee farmers. She is passionate about the intersection of civil engineering and social enterprise – the development of simple, durable, and effective products to help the poor increase their incomes; especially in the fields of water and agriculture. Her favorite things to do are travel, cook, and learn new languages.